I drew lines with a blue pencil. Navy-blue lines, about as many as there are ruled on each page. I drew them with my eyes open and with my eyes closed. With my right hand and my left. Now I’m closing my eyes as I write this line. Like letting go of the steering wheel, look how I’m veering off course. Still, you need a notebook if you want to experience all the different kinds of lines a person can draw.
I drew the lines with a blue school pencil. I’ve realised that lines repeated from the top to the bottom of the page look like waves. To quote the sea:
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‘The sea is the purest and foulest water: for fish drinkable and life-sustaining; for men undrinkable and deadly’, I read in a book by Simone Weil. In other words, the stairs that go up and the stairs that go down are one and the same.
It’s true, I’m in the middle of the sea. I thought I was swimming forwards, but I’m getting further away. What a strange sensation, thinking you’re getting closer when really you’re getting further away. Maybe I should ask Tania’s cousin for more detail, or enquire on the strip in Acapulco.
There are three thick lines in this Ideal notebook: the sea, the dwarf and the swallow. They’re three siblings talking about Jonás. My Jonás. The sea is the oldest, the dwarf is in the middle, and the swallow is the youngest, my favourite. The sea has always been jealous of his sister, the swallow. When they were children, he tried to give her away to the rag-and-bone man.
The rag-and-bone man must have had a Greek equivalent. In some corner of Greek mythology, the original rag-and-bone man drew things towards his cart with the power of his mind.
My Ideal notebook can be an iPod.
An ideal notebook is also a karaoke booth. In its infancy, an ideal notebook can be a drinks coaster, and in later years it can be used to wedge doors open. An ideal notebook of reproductive age opens its two pages even if it’s late, it opens its pages even if it’s a Sunday morning, like now. An ideal notebook is also a telephone. An ideal notebook allows a Greek metamorphosis to take place in the middle of an office like the one where I work. An ideal notebook isn’t written in the third person, or in the first or second, it’s written in all three because it’s ideal. The same goes for the verb tenses. An ideal notebook can be short, fragmentary, disconnected, long and in-depth, or superficial. It does everything, it allows everything, because Hermes is the almighty father of notebooks.
An ideal notebook has special effects, listen:
A building collapses.
A city crumbles.
The sea parts in two.
A storm breaks.